Mr. Chris — this is why you and your son are confused. What should be a “fiscal conservative” movement has turned into the “March of the Ignorant Voters” … the protesters think they can have the best of both worlds. This is why they’re mad and loud … they can’t understand they might have to sacrifice something in order to have lower taxes.

It is easier to yell and scream and wave guns and cheer Sarah Palin than to have to realize that you’re gonna have to for go those freebie Gub’mint services.

I could be wrong (I frequently am), but you could tax the top 1% at a 100% tax rate and that wouldn’t be enough to balance the budget. Other people need to pay some taxes too. I would propose a nice flat income tax rate, or maybe a consumption tax. If you buy stuff, you pay tax, and if you save money, you don’t pay taxes. I’m sure that won’t fly, so the only way around the fiscal hole that grows larger each day is going to be to cut spending (good luck with that one) or to implement some form of wealth tax to take away what all those nasty “rich” people have socked away in their bank accounts and property management companies etc. Incidentally, someone should inform our beloved leaders in Washington and Hartford that, around here anyway, $250k in income does not make you rich or wealthy.

And yes, of course, the teabaggers like their government programs when it suits them (“keep your government hands off my Medicare” or whatever it was that someone said). They won’t hear of Medicare cuts, or changes to social security (like pushing out the retirement age to account for the fact that people live a lot longer now than they used to and are capable of working for longer than before).

Why is anyone surprised? We’ve been forced to pay into the Social Security and Medicare ponzi schemes for years. These were sold as insurance programs: hand over a chunk of your paycheck in return for a pension and medical care in your dotage. So why should these, as opposed to outright welfare such Medicaid and Food Stamps, be cut? We aren’t asking for a hand-out, just to get back what we paid out of honest earnings. Or is everything the political types say a lie?

But you ain’t seen nothing yet. This is now rapidly becoming a socialist country and I’d suggest the patriotic thing to do is to do nothing. By that I mean nothing. If you can avoid being productive, do so. Socialism is expensive and needs armies of slaves beavering away to keep the tax cash cascading in to pay off the lower classes. Why do you want to help finance your oppressor? The side benefit is that in the process of doing nothing you qualify for lots of government cash for yourself and help drive a stake into the monster’s heart.

If I sound bitter, and I sure as hell am, it’s because I’ve been here before in the UK and have also had an intimate brush with the old Soviet system. But the rules have changed, and if you can’t beat them, join them, happy in the knowledge that if everybody does so the card house will come tumbling down and we’ll be free again.

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what benefits your country owes you. And vote conservative.

I’m an increasingly disgusted “moderate liberal” who believes we’re heading way too far to the left. I’m looking for a new political home but I’m not even remotely able to find one.

The Social Security “debates” are maybe the best example of why I despair. Politicians of all stripes conveniently forget SS’s underpinnings. When the payout age was set at 65, the average American life expectancy was 63. The program requires a certain number of contributing workers for each retiree in order to be viable, and that ratio is fading fast. The program was intended to supplement your retirement plan (quaint notion, eh?) and personal savings (even quainter!), not to make up for their absence. And no one dares tell the people who “paid into the system my whole life and am just getting what I deserve” that they could take all their contributions, and all their employers’ contributions, and compound them at a reasonable rate, and adjust for inflation, and it would only cover a fraction of the ultimate payout.

Alleged fiscal conservatives are just as guilty as unabashed leftists when it comes to ignoring economic realities in order to pander to their constituencies.

How about a third party, the “Time to Grow Up” party, with David Walker as presidential candidate?

I have no argument whatsoever with Old School Grump’s analysis except for one thing: the Government of the United States of America made the promise that in exchange for mandatory contributions to Social Security and Medicare workers would be given pensions and retirement medical care.

Now, either the Government’s word is worth something or it isn’t. If it isn’t then we need to examine lots of other things such as: will we ever get any care under Obamacare? If an insurance company tried to welsh on its contracts the people involved would hopefully go to prison. Can we hope the same for our illustrious leaders?

But assuming that’s not the case I take the position that workers with Social Security and Medicare accounts have first claim on the Treasury, even if that means ending payments for wars to “spread Democracy”, for pensions to government bureaucrats, for aid to third-world countries and for payoffs to people in the inner cities and to fund the Food Stamp and Medicaid give-ways.